Pol Bury: Fountains and Other Intriguing Works

July 15 through September 11, 1999 

Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to participate in our fourth Absolut-L.A. International Biennial Art Invitational with a spectacular solo exhibition of Kinetic Sculpture and other intriguing works by world-reknown contemporary artist, Pol Bury. 

Born in Haine-Saint-Pierre, Belgium, in 1922, Pol Bury attended the Académie des Beaux-Arts for only one year before he chose instead to explore art through diverse artistic and intellectual meetings. From 1938 to 1945, he joined a group of Belgian surrealists, and he also served in the Belgian Resistance to World War II.  From these explorations Bury forged his own critical viewpoint, where individualism and a keen political consciousness ruled. He brought this journey of awareness to his art in many ways, but most especially in his enthusiasm for a  broad range of media, from painting, drawing, and collage to jewelry, sculpture,  and fountains. 

By the early 1950’s, a sense of movement generated the core inspiration of his work.  He constructed a series of Mobile Planes , that fused his earlier paintings with the revelation he experienced upon viewing Alexander Calder’s mobiles, which merge engineering and sculpture.  So it was that Bury, along with Calder, Soto, Duchamp, Agam, and Tinguely,  rode the first wave of Kinetic Sculpture out of France and into the United States, precisely when Americans were touting their first homegrown art movement, Abstract Expressionism. 

By 1960, Bury’s configurations offered optimal suspense between mobility and immobility – one system shut, another opening – in a combination of richly diverse materials, such as wood, red and yellow copper, aluminum, silverplate, stainless steel, electric motors, and electromagnets.  His stature grew to the extent  that in 1966 the first international exhibition of Kinetic Sculpture at the University Art Museum in Berkeley, California, featured his works.  Three years later he constructed the first of many kinetic fountains, one of which adorns the atrium of the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York (1980).  In 1992, France honored him with the Knight of the Legion of Honor.